ossblogger.com

I have been using a Salaat Time for quite some time now. I am very satisfied with its performance as it never misses to inform me the prayer time. Salaat Time is an application that calculates the prescribed five daily Muslim prayer times as well as Qiblah direction for anywhere in the world. It rests in the system tray and at the prescribed times the Athan sounds and/or displays visual alerts.

I decided to look for other Open Source alternative for similar software which I can use as an option for Salaat Time and maybe a plugin or widget for Wordpress. Unfortunately, I could not find any…

Islamic Prayer Times for Joomla

Instead, I found an Islamic Joomla extension. It is a module for Joomla portals that displays Islamic prayer times. Written by Omar Alrawi, a student from Purdue University, the prayer software can also:

• display prayer times right off islamicfinder.org
• display your own custom defined times just fill the text box
• display sunrise time
• add leading or trailing text to module before or after the times
• user defined Iqama times

I have email Omar and asked whether he could modify the script to become a Wordpress plugin or widget, because I wanted to put it inside my alumni community portal which runs Wordpress as the backend.

Prayer Times code

At the moment, I am using a PHP script from islamicfinder.org which is able to show daily prayer times of Kuala Lumpur, our Malaysian capital city.

You can get your own script from islamicfinder.org for your portal. You need select a country and a city where you live in. They will generate a script that you can cut and paste into your web page. And you can choose from either vertical or horizontal table presentation.

Side note: There are differences on calculating the prayer times for Fajr (Subuh) and Isya’, according to different methodology. If you don’t have the knowledge on which methodology to use, just choose the default value, and they will generate the script for you.

Prayer Software

I am slightly disappointed in this area when I found NONE of the open source prayer softwares that is listed in Sourceforge.net is working. I found 2 - Adhan Alarm and TrayAdhan - which both have bugs. After installation, I could not get the software working as expected.

It gives me no choice but to look for other software from other places. I found Mawaqit from Hotscripts.com. Mawaqit has a similar functionality with Salaat Time, but the presentation of the software is much more interesting. Basically, both of the softwares have these key features:

• Set different athans at different prayer times or use the random feature.
• Selection of different discreet visual alerts including balloon tips and tray flash.
• Qiblah direction in graphical compass-like format.
• Time until next prayer with a dynamic graphical interface for time-remaining.
• Daily, monthly and yearly prayer time views.
• Moon phases in Hijri and Gregorian calendars.
• Transform Hijri dates to Gregorian and vice-versa.

I fell in love the first time I saw Mawaqit. It has a very beautiful GUI compared to Salaat Time.

Mawaqit GUI

Salaat Time GUI

Salaat Time will have a notification balloon during prayer time and Mawaqit will have a pop-ups from the system tray, showing Muazzin reciting Azan.

So, which one is better?

Personally, I like Mawaqit’s GUI and presentation very much. But in terms of extra features like exporting and printing monthly prayer time calendars in both Hijri and/or Gregorian formats and listen to the Quran from a selection of Suras and Ayaats, only Salaat Time have those features.

Salaat Time website also have a lot more to offer to Muslim computer users, with audio lectures and custom folder of audio and image files which you can add-on to your Salaat Time software for enhancement.

p/s: Hoping for Adhan Alarm and Tray Alarm to be updated…

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 12:31 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.